Friday Worldbuilding Fun: Supers Appear in Different Eras and/or Settings

[Ruin Explorer]

Why does everyone who makes cool stuff always end up sucking as a person?

Keeping it short because off-topic - I think it's always been a major issue but the way the press operated before 24 hour news and the internet, it was generally in their interests to play it off as "funny eccentricity" or euphemise the hell out of it - i.e. "He's a ladies man" (meaning "he chases 13-year-olds around"), and celebs didn't have the same ability to dob themselves in, because they couldn't get on Twitter and say "Maybe we should politely genocide [powerless minority group] because they mildly annoyed me!". I guarantee you had Twitter existed in say, 1960, we'd have some amazing information exactly who Elvis thought should be executed, say.

Part of it is definitely age too - an awful lot of these people suddenly tilt from "has some weird ideas, or "kind of a jerk" or "seems like a creep maybe" to outright frothing nutcasery in their 50s and 60s (feels like if you make it to 70 without becoming a monster, you'll probably stay fine), I guess because of some combination of early-onset dementia, "I have too much money to care", "People don't listen to me anymore!" and so on.

God this could probably be applied to superheroes with chilling effect too.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

God this could probably be applied to superheroes with chilling effect too.

Homelander has mass-murdered the chat

 

[Blue]

There was a new GURPS Infinite Worlds PDF released recently: Gotterdammerung.

Infinite Worlds in general are a series of alternate-earth worlds with key divergences from the ‘home timeline’. Gotterdammerung is a ‘unique’ phenomena in the Infinite Worlds campaign frame. It features multiple different alternative earths that have collapsed into one. It has four different overlayed ‘substrates’ where powers first emerged: Mesopotamia in 1150 BC, China in 480 BC, Greece in 323 BC, and the USA in 1750 AD. Each source of variance tends to spawn different types of powers, and the current-day world powers (i.e. great power nations) are heavily influenced by the presence of these special individuals.

It’s a very interesting campaign concept.

Woo, that's TORG! I played that back in the early 90s.

 

[dbm]

It has some Torg vibes, but there aren’t reality cosms where the rules of reality bend as you enter them.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Have you created a setting where supers appear at a "non-traditional" time and/or place? Did it result in a capes and cowls superhero setting? What comics or RPGs or video games have you seen where supers appeared sometime other than the 20th century? Did you use those for inspiration?

Well, anyone familiar with my posting here will probably not be surprised to see me drop in!

My best campaign EVER was a HERO game set in 1900, using the Space:1889 RPG setting. Besides that and the same inspirations that game’s designers used, I also drew from William Gibson, Michael Moorcock, Harry Turtledove, Alien Nation, Kung Fu, Marvrl & DC comics, anime, American & European history, Wild, Wild West, and the James Bond movies to name a few. The PCs were super agents in GAIA, a multinational police agency- essentially an analog of INTERPOL- with global & interplanetary jurisdiction.

I had 100% player buy in, and I was probably at my personal peak as a GM. It was 18 months of awesome.

A decade+ later, I tried resurrecting the setting in a different game group, in a different city, using Mutants & Masterminds 2Ed. The timeline was started in 1914, and instead of being super agents, the PCs were more like The X-Men. It flopped, for several reasons.

 

[Tonguez]

I recalled a couple of days ago a Superheroes game we did in which the characters were all inspired by Fairytale characters
eg CINDR Ella with her magical ball gown instead wore a "Chroma-Inductive Neuro-Dynamic Reactive suit" that generates hardlight structures adapted to look like clothes to create illusory disguises (and armour), camouflage, hardlight gauntlets, prismatic flares and improved reactions. Big Bad Werewolf, The Huntsman (Master Archer), Rapunzel (Telekinetic Hair) and The Little Matchgirl (whose alchemical matches can be used offensively or to burn 'portals' in space-time)